Fallacy of the perfect dictionary

I want battalions

No metaphor or fact

Beautiful horse or storm

With a chance it will kill

Passed out to perfection

Too close to repulse

Our adrenal event

Celebrates the scepter class

The shadow defense

Happily draped

Nothing but an effect

You are confirmed in seat 21C

Goosefat & gristle

Caws to muscle

Who's buried in the floor

Who wants to know

The Equalizer - Third Series

PDF of The Equalizer #3 - with bookmarks for sections

If you download, it's a bit easier to navigate. Thx to editor Michael Schiavo.

Samuel Ace
Jeff Alessandrelli
Zachary Anderson
Rae Armantrout
Steve Barbaro
Alan Bernheimer
Elizabeth Bevilacqua
Cathleen Bonner
Ana Bozicevic
Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Simon Brown
Megan Burns
Jenna Cardinale
Ching-In Chen
Lauren Rose Clark
Shane Clements
Clark Coolidge
Jack Davis
Jordan Davis
Shira Dentz
Christopher DeWeese
Cody Donovan
Trezlen Drake
Carolina Ebeid
Zack Finch
Jessica Fisher
Graham Foust
Benjamin Friedlander
Schuyler Greenway
Phillip Griffith
Luke Hankins
Nathan Hauke
Maximilian Heinegg
Destiny Hemphill
Walidah Imarisha
Mason Just
Robin Kirby
Michael Lally
Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
Carlos Gomez Marquez
Maya Marshall
Charlie Martin
Farid Matuk
Charlee Meiners
Lynn Melnick
Catherine Meng
Sharon Mesmer
Philip Metres
Robert Mittenthal
Gina Myers
Sanjana Nair
Urayoán Noel
Alice Notley
Dylan Nutter
Jena Osman
John Pluecker
Alex Quinn
Raquel Salas Rivera
Anthony Robinson
Judith Roitman
Jan Sanderson
Adam Strauss
Jacob Sunderlin
Eileen R. Tabios
Adam Tedesco
TC Tolbert
Gabriella Torres
Sarah Trudgeon
Jennifer Tseng
Vickie Vértiz
Emylisa Warrick
Afaa Michael Weaver
Stephen Scott Whitaker
Geoffrey Young
Timothy Yu

Niagara

I trust the hammer

Idyllic tears & tributaries

back basin echo to sign the air

to trap the fish

Your low center of gravity

somersaults to evade

Niagara’s request

was it Destroy all monsters or the MC5

lacking the love Iggy required

Stooges unable to answer

A riot not a strike

no misnomer

happily withdrawn

Cave of our own making

how do you spell

lost words how do you spell

missing ingredient

your article too kind

the Utopian airways

boat floating all boats

what is or equals

echo and Narcissus

I rest my case

painful letters cascade

‎fingerprints

loop after loop

here to perform the vanishing trick

Haunted illusion

false to its own memory

They say it is curtains

named for the Roman gods

who hammered the water

Duck and Coverlet

Full glass

take half

yogurt & salt

desiccate

submerge in olive oil

apply pepper

Repeat the following week

Recipe for form

clipped back into sound

Our ship hidden

hounded by gulls

absent the foul taste

Denial is a siren song

I dreamt I was in the engine car or caboose
someone said do not feel what you are feeling

do not enter the arms of the feral beast

this is how the world ends

Follow the marching ants & form a ball

a bridge in which the future is written

A world of diagrams & intercept points

It's after the end of the world

‎I'd seen him

singing Soviet songs on his stroll

If we were centipedes

Lost in our own footnotes

What new light trapped inside

I tied tubes

walked to the shoal

Another day at the thought collective

Sound of ducks landing

on the interstate

Motioned to appeal the motion

Imprisoned in the wave that follows

Beyond where we can see

6 minutes to dissolve

to undermine this moment

red hull 

stars on the sea

Empathy toolkit

Looked for rational limits

Gave myself to machines

to the accumulation of lost counts

Took truth off the market

Denounced myself in 25 words or less

If inoculation is overrated

I need proper nouns

not enough pop in the punch

to counter levels of abstraction in the time required

Is it time I asked myself

Compassion not capitulation

Is it about to rain

a poem invoking or inducing rain

No living to make until the living makes you

This is the new fake me to the tune of

50,000 or jail time or was it twinkle twinkle little star

followed by the hegemony of what we want 

We want Architecture to breed the negative

to fire that fungal thing

to connect Tree to shining tree

not Capital's unquenchable thirst

Donner Party of six billion

(too many served or starved)

Each vampire homes in and hides out

Each zombie shoeless unvested

I am not Apollo but plague him

Of all her words none

gendered unfortunate

Lost if the message comes out

The only question is

who moved into this life

no breakfast or lunch

Mother of all ghosts

can't double back

sounding alarm for Apollo

What’s the name of that song

what’s the voice of that voice

the infernal exit back on the highway

I am not Apollo but plague him

Book of business

Misdemeanor of body props
prosaic error breathed & ministered
I mistook my candy cane for your cotton candy
our ghosts are now riot ready
I am saying here’s the rub
there is too much ownership
possession is 9 parts stealth & 1 part domination
sold by the hour how
to import hash value how
to ignore the invariant details
the error regulated
& stormed out of bounds

All power to the reader!

Chemical Brothers "Get Yourself High" from Joseph Kahn on Vimeo.

Poem in the form of labor

Description is not enough

The soft Buddhism of your lips

twinned voices to intoxicate my singularity

when each of us were many

There can be no umbrella no diagram to trace

the retreat of advancing troops

no treadmill that hits for the so-called cycle

no analog of tree

no coveralls to save Mr Green Jeans

Nothing to unpack The Fantastic Four

just me & Invisible Girl together for the first time

Episode 1: duel of force & relation

How the subject fails to swallow

totality rejuvenated by jam

this is our toast to destruction

Episode 2: green room

Caught in the alien lights

I have been wiped and swattled

O how I have been wiped and swattled

Thought bubbles written behind my back

deposited in the currency of pleasure & pain

So much depends upon

the logic of the presupposed Earth

Freedom and domination co-constituted

Scaffold to ponder scaffold

to execute that killer app

to render the privilege of comic mode

aswim in individual shadow

away from the brutalism of sun

your self-valorizing value forms a business plan

for monsters by monsters

Dear Mr Fantastic it is time to go

Time to kill value - what’s the use - before fact

Character first in a structure that compels

each step confirming the prior step

the strangeness of her lips

Dark wallnuts & grey willows

subjective invisibility

inserts exclamation for The Thing!

this time featuring Human Torch

I want to be inside that outside

 

Radiant Constantinoples

Middle finger companion piece

Carat cake for malingerers

Cleavage cleavage

We all fall down

The nude foundation

No change of clothes

I turned the page

for mere subsistence

hunting to gather

no economic apparatus

guided by wounds

visible to all outsiders

Each morning one constructs a face

Cash for clothes

wearing Wilson's dollar bill

looking to cross

the mount of material expression

Moonstruck on the bridge

Implicit leakage

cinched up pants in primary colors

Aloha shirts

cotton based nightware

stitched in gold

3 piece loungewear

enamel shoes

eyeglasses at comically sharp angles

short permanent waves

smoking at home

modified school uniforms

inhaling paint fumes

hilarious bitmap

snot machine for

failed truants

some ride vehicles some do not

Tick Tock Philosophy

"Forensics is eloquence‎ and reduction"  -Gertrude Stein

This was trying to make - at some point - a point about Bergson's inadequate notion of time - which emphasizes a "continuity of becoming" - rather than a more Whiteheadian "becoming of continuity."  Perhaps it is a strange defense of Baudelaire -- against the Poundian: "la continuite (sic) n'est pas artificiel" (pardon the French, pardon the hellish mistranslation) - Baudelaire had a book "les paradis artificiels" - which Pound had a problem with.  

Ferocity plus disinterest

equals what?

Celebrity against

failure

I means business

to write shorter bursts

Hors d'oeuvres that live up to their name

(outside the work)

Just kidding but

seriously doesn't anyone understand

"purpos‎iveness without purpose"

(think aimless goals, accidental design)

This ain't no roadside picnic

but who cares?

Yes, I don't care

Don't force me to compete

stronger in the tumult

Of the many

Of the no more

Of the don't ask don't tell

That stabbing sensation

Times out

Quarter horses

To soar or sing

Of damage

Irrelevant to pleasure

The concept engine

Con game

Cruelty for a day

For ideal card counts and thieves

Thumbed under the sign

Cleansed in comfort

Lacking vision

Muscle memory (pause of play)

Somewhere in the history of chewing gum

the oscillation of molars

Involuntary vision

separates form & concept

In the dirt collector’s dream   

little nouns aerate soil

What does not kill

brackets us one bug at a time

Improbable but with full orchestration

At ease with unease

Only the dead know nothing

what is it to live

to block the thought that arrives

to sustain affirmative forgetting

Rushing station to station

to lose the habit

one pays to acquire

so-called histories

with the more musical names

Rumba or Cha-Cha

Rhomboid dream whose felt operands

map out incongruent math

to clear Parades of equations

How sound rises to swallow thought

The weight of the tongue a tourniquet where

words check themselves at the door

Celebrity Zombie

Shook hands with John Cage

Dreamt I was Vincent Price

Kissed Harrison Ford on the mouth

Dracula never had it so good

Guns on stun

$3M in Fentanyl at Central Park West

I met Shelley on a plane from LA

But she wasn’t‎ monstrous enough

See how she sobs

‎Running from the camera

It’s the end of the burrito

That should be the Beatles

When belonging doesn't rhyme

It all comes down to specimens  

26 years of Plato’s forms

‎She actually said I adore myself

Time for a Tyranny timeout   

I’d like you to meet the walking dead

Picasso’s grunt

He was both a positive & negative assist

More than one Signatory

But refused to cash the check

Written out to Lyric Poetry

Without the hormones

If the broom fits

      -after the Yerbamala collective & SR

This next poem is called Infection

Phenotype eye poison

or how we are infected with whiteness

The unstoried poet touchtypes

It’s his mother’s dictate

Gender’s abandoned punchcard

Tell him to tell it to the dead

the Irish joke already gone

These fists of mine

Bled in from mixing

the color of epidemic

captured or orphaned

I heard the food hit the floor

3 second rule but ate it anyway

2 lovely sons

Listened to 4 saints

but lost it at 3 card monte

2 one-hundred franc notes

Paris flea mart 

near parochial school

I see your city

& surrender it

I see you in such a metropolis

Mother of figure & line

She said welcome cavemen

welcome conquests

so long ritual onslaught

This next poem is called

If the broom fits (witch)

it is time to ride

Capitalism & Climate Change

It depends on what ‘is’ is

Errant scare quotes if the world is

actually immersed

in lost positives

or imagined dynamics

(I'll take false cons for 100 please)

Trapped in amber

ampules at Grasse

vials and beakers

actual essence unfolding

in the aroma of the golden lab

History lost

in the empire of always already

alive in vampiric fake history

Not sure the world actually is

Death Wish for Dummies

I’ll take Hume’s mere object

Psychic add-in’s for 100

Placebos & power grabs

What is piece of cake addiction

Booty traps & Pooh Bears

‎Spontaneous & equally immune

What’s the point if we can’t have fun

It’s General Grant’s call to play

He who loves personal ads

magic and divination

the study of books long vigils

licentious pleasures

superstitions of Egypt

Let us drink to frozen images of ourselves

to the blue faction of insects

to Cirrus Cumulus

to the Animus of all containers

to what reality looks like

Nature or The Receptacle

Let us drink to the world

to seeing and being seen, to elbow room

to consciousness & discomfort

to sentience & lack of control

Sophistry will tell

What the words did

or whose grimace left me undone

Bearded lady younger than she actually was

but time folds

subject to appearance

Doubled white the mask

she resembles the mimes

& the skin (which was Andy

Warhol's famous problem)

Is there no moral they said

Run don't walk or look don't think

Two magazines loaded

Definite articles

it's the younger taller

versus what - the taller bolder

One must manage one

self as a slate wiped clean

Dear friend of species in their readers

Reason hates me 
marbling meat hooks for what 
for panic and uneven character

I slipped the up word into the down draft
As if my primate rewires habit 
into less visible gains

I love mysteries, eye rolls
What never truly gets inside

X automatically equals X or Y

Signs affirmative or not
Words swallow their neighbors but do not become them

Confined to the body because smallness

Because exclusivity breeds only itself
ending in decline

Against your singular church

Against the jealous Cops
Let us drink to the end of orthodoxy
to the ticket that says ‘admit one’ 

More alive than have ever been dead

Millions wash themselves in light of the moving image
Let us stop here

before poets become polytheists
clowns of fiction
accountants of vigor & empire

before fists of reason 

commit precision 
Militant curiosity 

instrumental at each point
Before thought ascends
& pompous dictates prove nothing

before slag forms 
& carbon rises

before I reach inside to curtain night

The Con of Words

after Canetti

Marched to the city gates

A ban on barricades

Punchlines

bred and raised

Stop here to forget

Spinoza’s run on sentences

Stop to embrace the dog of time

not easily roused‎

Receptive to whistles above

The Best Response

Gave it the old one two

affirmative thump

knock twice for No

The three of us

detourned content

‎as he went down

One steps up on it

as a new continent

wimpered like a dog

Let us assume no assumptions

derivative outlawed

the moon's repetitions

Gaia’s bindweed

against immanence

stowed away at inner core‎

Decision wants

the generous pour

unmeasured glee

To run up alongside

each illegible memoir

surveilling future

For the world’s faceplant

Beeswax plunder

‎Hive fives

To flush away grievance

I don’t need your poem

‎tooting its horn

Some cowboy dialectic

against the non-poetic

theory of poetics

Man from UNCLE

Character acting

said the Methodist

I got to hand it to her

As we travel from apple to orange

betrayed by a kiss

metonymy never tasted so good

Dear Conrad

In the mad-house of tragic mopers

beneath your shadow

Mechanical Turk exchanged

pawns beheaded bishops

No antidote for what feeds on its own

no upside for Brownshirts

no piece of work

no downside for blackcake surrealists

Because rehearsed & scorned

because lower limit chivalry

Charity full stop